


I'll Be The Rain

by littledaybreaker



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-04-21
Packaged: 2018-03-25 02:36:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3793504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littledaybreaker/pseuds/littledaybreaker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It isn't love. It's just best friends who have sex and secrets, hashbrowns and coffee, but maybe that's exactly what love is after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Be The Rain

**Author's Note:**

> a) This was supposed to be angsty, but it ended up not being that way. Jury is still out on how I feel about that. Maybe I'll try angst later. 
> 
> b) I HATE the ending. But I wrote it and re wrote it three dozen times and realised that this was just going to go on forever if I didn't commit to ending it. 
> 
> c) all I can hope is that this makes as much sense as I think it does. Unbeta'ed and I'm still foggy from a surgery I had almost a week ago. Please forgive me if it doesn't. (make sense)
> 
> d) Title and epigraph from the song "Fire Escape" by Fastball. Throwing it back to 1998! Why? I don't know. Because I felt like it.

_I don’t wanna make you mad_

_I don’t wanna meet your dad_

_I don’t wanna be your dream come true_

_Cause I don’t know just what I’ve found_

_I don’t know my sky from ground_

_I don’t know where I’m going to_

_I don’t know about you_

_I’ll be the rain falling on your fire escape_

_And I may not be the man you want me to_

_But I can be myself, how about you?_

 

“We’re not in love or nothin’,” he says, “We’re just having fun. Right, Pricey?”

Carey’s head jerks up more quickly than intended, but he bares his teeth in what he hopes is a smile. Nods. Drinks his beer. Why is PK talking about this? Carey opens his mouth, about to inquire, but the subject has been changed and the moment has past. Carey closes his mouth. Tries to forget about it.-

 

PK’s drunk by the end of the night and wants Carey to bring him home. Carey’s sober enough, so he shrugs and nods and grabs his jacket and PK’s from the coat check. “Come on then,” he says.

PK wraps his arm around Carey’s waist. Carey does not protest. “Hey, are you mad at me?”

“Come on,” Carey repeats, wiggling away. PK looks irritated, but he puts his jacket on and shoves his hands in the pockets. He doesn’t say another word until after Carey drops him off. “Thanks,” he says, not meeting Carey’s eyes. Carey drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “Got your keys?” he asks. He’s not going to bail PK out tonight. Won’t.

“Yeah. G’night, Pricey.”

“Night.”

Carey waits until he sees the hall light go on in PK’s house to drive away. As he waits, he switches his phone off.

 

“I don’t think you even understand what love is,” Angela had told him when he told her he was filing for divorce, told her the why. It was betrayal talking, he’d known it then and he knew it now, betrayal and confusion and hurt, all the things he’d known to expect, but right now he can’t help but wonder if it’s true. He bends to greet the dogs, rubbing their faces and making excited noises at them and letting them out into the yard to bound their excitement out and pee, and then grabs a beer out of the fridge to nurse while watching them leap and bound and kick at the mostly melted snow in the semi-darkness. Sure, he’d never taken PK on a date, per se, but that didn’t seem like part of the necessary formula for love. Neither did having to say they were dating, or boyfriends, or whatever people were calling it these days. In fact, Carey wasn’t even sure you had to say the words I love you out loud to qualify as being in love. Because it wasn’t about the words, was it? It was about the things they shared, not the things they said--and surely, they’d shared enough to qualify as in love, right? It’s too much for Carey to think about but he’s thinking about it anyway, thinking about it so hard that Duke just about runs him over coming back inside. “Come on, you idiot, let’s go to bed,” Carey says, and he’s unsure if he’s talking to the dogs or himself.

 

There’s two text messages from PK on his phone when Carey wakes up and turns it back on. “i meant take me home” says one, from last night, with one of the smirking emojis, but the other one says “i fucked up, breakfast?” and it’s from five minutes prior. Carey hesitates for a moment, texts back, “I’ve got the coffee, you bring the breakfast burritos. Don’t eat my fucking hashbrown.”

 

To be perfectly fair to PK, it had started as a hookup. But it had always been more than that, hadn’t it? Before they were having sex, they were sharing private smiles, they were always together, they were inseparable, practically. Carey had confided all his secrets in PK before he’d even vaguely considered the idea of PK’s dick in his ass, and when he’d finally come out to PK, one night when it snowed so hard that they couldn’t get the door open and there was no way PK was driving back to the city in that, it had been PK who had found Carey’s lips, PK who had kissed him first. The bond had come first, and then the sex, and surely that had to matter for something, right?

 

PK shows up half an hour later holding up a McDonald’s bag with a sheepish expression on his face, and Carey snatches it, inspecting. But his hashbrown is intact, so he sets it on the table, grudgingly offering PK a mug of coffee, which he accepts.

“I’m sorry about last night,” PK offers. “They were making fun and I was--it was to protect you.”

Carey pretends to be extremely interested in eating a breakfast burrito. He closes his eyes. Nods.

There’s a moment of silence. “I hate when you do that,” PK says.

“Dwuh?” Carey asks, mouth full of burrito. He swallows. “Do what?”

“That...silent treatment shit. You were doing it last night, too.”

Carey watches PK drink his coffee. He’s been making them coffee since the first time PK had stayed over too long and ended up crashing on the couch, and he told Carey it was the best damn coffee he’d ever had. He brings it in a thermos to the rink sometimes, wakes up early to make it and everything. Isn’t that love, too? Finally, he says, “I don’t have anything to say.”

“Bullshit you don’t,” PK says, and there’s an edge to his voice now. “You’ve got a look like you want to say something but you’re not. And I hate that shit, Pricey. Just tell me what’s on your damn mind already.”

Carey knits his brow together. “Don’t talk about our hooking up or whatever. You know I hate it.”

“Aw, Pricey.” PK puts a hand on the back of his neck. Carey doesn’t pull away. “They all already know, it’s no big deal.”

Now Carey does pull away. “But it is a big deal!” he says, his voice louder than he intended, and PK looks a little startled. Carey softens, whispers, “I’m sorry.”

“De rien,” PK says, and they both smile. “Hey, c’mere.”

 

They end up having sex, slow and languid, in Carey’s bed. PK’s still trying to atone, doing all the things Carey likes, taking his time with the foreplay, running his hands all over Carey’s body. He gives him a back rub when they’re done, too, until all the knots are worked out and Carey’s a pile of mush on the mattress. That, too, feels like love, but Carey doesn’t say anything. He’s too relaxed and his eyelids are too heavy. “Stay,” he instructs PK before drifting off.

 

When Carey wakes up a couple hours later, PK is sitting on the edge of the bed, doing absolutely nothing but watching him. Carey smiles sleepily.

“Mornin’, sleeping beauty,” says PK.

“Mmm, well, it’s your fault.” Carey holds out his arms, still too sleepy to process. It’s probably the wrong thing to do, but PK lays next to him and Carey promptly forgets about it.

They lay there in silence a few minutes, Carey almost lulled back to sleep by the sound of their quiet breathing, before PK says, “I can’t.”

Carey opens one eye. “Huhm?”

“Love you,” PK says, “I can’t, Pricey.”

“Am I that bad?” Carey asks, half joking.

PK sits up, and Carey’s awake now. Grudgingly, but awake. “I...can’t do that, Pricey. I can’t be a gay hockey player, you know.”

“But you are a gay hockey player,” Carey points out. “Saying or not saying the words doesn’t make you more or less gay.”

PK gives him a look like he’s missed the point, and Carey feels chastened momentarily, like he said something wrong. “I can’t do what you do, I can’t be some kind of ambassador. It’s different for me, you know that.”

Yes, Carey supposes, he does know that. “I don’t see why that means we can’t have something away from the media, like we already do,” he says quietly.

“We can’t,” PK says definitively. “And if this is too hard on you, Pricey, then we’re not going to do this anymore.”

Carey blinks twice and picks at his cuticles. “Fine,” he says. “Fine by me. When you’re ready to be who you really are, give me a call.”

PK hesitates like he’s going to say something, then thinks better of it and leaves without another word.

 

They don’t speak to each other for days. Even on the ice they’re not in sync with each other. It gets to the point where Therrien benches Carey just so that PK can run through drills.

“We’re going to start Tokarski tomorrow,” Therrien informs him, and Carey shrugs, nods his understanding. He knows he has to shake this, knows he can’t be letting stupid things like this affect him, but he can’t quite figure out how to. Every solution he has keeps coming back to a certain defenseman, and while Carey might not always be the most socially adept guy on the ice, he’s certainly adept enough to figure that one out.

 

This goes on for several days. Tokarski starts two in a row, the fans are rioting, PK still hasn’t said a single word to him. Carey is fairly convinced that it’s the end of the world as they know it, that this is just going to go on forever, and he’s considering his other career options when one morning he walks into the dressing room to find a McDonald’s hashbrown tucked into the top of his cubby, with a sticky note stuck to it that says “I think I might be ready to try now” in PK’s handwriting. Carey picks it up, reads it, smiles and tucks the note into his back pocket, munching the hashbrown. All that time spent analysing love and his understanding of it, and all along he’d been missing the simplest and most essential element of the equation: patience.

 

He holds off on talking to him until they’re off the ice, but even without words, they’re back in sync again, running through their drills in perfect, wordless harmony just like always. The rest of the guys are beaming. Carey will start tonight.

 

They’re the last two off the ice, and PK catches Carey’s arm on their way back to the dressing room. “I left you a present,” he says, and Carey smiles. “I got it, thank you.”

“Uh.” PK ducks his head, and it’s cute--his momentary awkwardness. “Did you read the note?”

Carey nods, searching PK’s face, praying he isn’t about to change his mind. “I did,” he says, keeping his voice as even as possible.

“So, about that. Uh...you wanna go for lunch?”

Carey smirks. “Like on a date?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I guess I’d like that.”

PK leans over, cupping Carey’s face and pressing their lips together. It lasts all of about ten seconds, but he says more with that ten second kiss than their words have said in weeks. It isn’t going to be easy, Carey knows. It’s going to be messy and difficult and maybe he’s still going to end up heartbroken in the end. But all it takes is one look at PK, at his smile, at the way he looks at Carey like he’s the only person in the world, to know that it’s worth it.


End file.
